Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (NYSE:TDS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Michelle Brukwicki: Yeah. Hi, Sergey. Thank you for the questions. So yeah, if we kind of take our markets individually, we certainly have been balancing our fiber spending over the last few years. We’ve heavily gone into expansion markets, but we’ve also put a significant amount of investment into our ILEC markets. So our ILECs are 44% fibered up at this point. So that goes a long way to defending areas in our ILEC properties. At the moment, we’re not doing a lot of spending in our ILEC markets this year because we’ve got EA-CAM coming. So this year, we’re focusing on engineering and getting our plans lined up so that those builds can start going in 2025. And we’ll be fulfilling our EA-CAM commitments over the next few years.

That’s going to take a lot more fiber into our ILEC as well. And so that is going to serve as another great defense mechanism in our ILEC markets on top of all of the investment that we’ve already put in ourselves over the last many years, like over the last decade, really. So that’s our plan for the ILEC. There is competitive, you know, overbuilding that is happening in certain areas of our ILEC. That certainly is present. But we have tried to defend as much as possible with being preemptive and getting our fiber there as quickly as possible, and with going into the enhanced EA-CAM program to help fortify our ILEC even further.

Sergey Dluzhevskiy: Thank you.

Vicki Villacrez: Thanks, Sergey.

Michelle Brukwicki: Thanks, Sergey.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. Ms. Colleen Thompson, I turn the call back over to you.

Colleen Thompson: Okay. Thanks everyone for your time today. Please reach out to IR if you have additional questions and have a great weekend. Operator, we can close out the call.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.